


A Good Day

by Major



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Feelings, First Kiss, Friendship, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29313675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Malcolm and Edrisa get held captive, poisoned, and almost die together.It’s a pretty good day.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Edrisa Tanaka
Comments: 14
Kudos: 55





	A Good Day

Malcolm glanced back at Edrisa to make sure she wasn’t about to collapse as they raced down the road and crossed in front of a taxi with honks and angry shouts that chased after them as they went. He needed to slow down because she couldn’t keep up, but he couldn’t slow down because slowing down was death. Literally. The handcuffs that chained their wrists together clanked between them as she scrambled just behind him, arm outstretched as he hauled her along.

“I can’t tell if this is the worst day of my life,” she said as she panted and huffed at his side, “or a dream come true. You’re really”—she gulped for air—“not bad company when we’re not, you know—”

“On the brink of an absurdly painful death by poison at the hands of the killer of the week?” Malcolm flashed her a smile as they cut in front of a pissed off pretzel vendor, got sworn at by a florist they rammed by, and very nearly avoided getting beheaded by a construction crew swinging a beam around on the next corner.

“Yeah.” Edrisa slammed into his back as he came to a sudden stop and glanced this way and that up and down both streets to get his bearings. “That.”

“This way.”

Malcolm slowed to a quick walk as he turned right and headed for the pawn shop down the block. All the running was a big, bad, terrible idea, only forcing the poison through their systems faster. But this was the only way to get to the antidote in time. Sure, they could have waited around for the ambulance and then waited for the right tests to be done at the hospital, but that was all time, time that they didn’t have. It was now or death by poison injected by an honest-to-God mustache-twirling bad guy. Literally. He twirled his mustache while delivering his ultimatum. Malcolm was willing to do a lot for a case, but he drew the line at dying at the hands of a cartoon villain.

“Here we are.” He opened the door to the pawn shop for her, and they made the awkward, handcuffed shuffle together through the doorway. “Gus, you got it?”

Gus was the owner of the shop and, more importantly, a guy he knew with a line in the black market and quick access to weird stuff. He glanced over at them from the doorway to his office behind the counter in the back, but kept his eyes trained on the exit to the shop in a sloppy Hawaiian t-shirt and shorts.

“Not yet. Two minutes, probs.”

“Great.” Malcolm led Edrisa to a narrow red velvet bench seat up against the wall and sat down. “Well, we’ll _probs_ be unconscious by then, so just stab it into us when it gets here.”

Edrisa dropped down next to him with a quick turn of her head. “I’m sorry, ‘stab’? Did you say stab?”

“Sure. The antidote. Gus does this all the time. It’ll be fine.”

Edrisa turned her attention to sweaty Gus with the armpit stains and the uneven sideburns and didn’t look reassured.

“I’m not into the whole stabbing thing. I’ve been stabbed enough today with needles. I’m a doctor,” she added with a little laugh.

“Yes.”

“So I will administer the antidote myself.”

“Of course,” Malcolm agreed. “If you’re conscious, that is the best plan. I would choose an injection from you over getting poked by Gus any day.”

Gus burped and scratched his stomach across the room, but contrary to Edrisa’s withering reaction to that, Malcolm had trusted Gus with weirder things before.

“Great,” Edrisa said and immediately began to slump loosely against him, eyes rolling back as she folded.

“No, no, no. Edrisa.” Malcolm cupped her cheek and jingled the handcuffs as he lifted his other hand to hold her upright. “Hey. Stay awake. We’re going to be poison free in less than two minutes. Two minutes is nothing. And since two minutes is nothing, really, if you think about it, it’s like we’re already cured.”

Edrisa stirred enough to murmur, “Yeah.”

“Yeah!” Malcolm stayed bright despite the increase in his own pulse that he couldn’t contribute solely to their run. Sweat was starting to break out over his brow. His mouth was growing dry, and there was a low throb at the back of his head. They needed that antidote now. “So we’re… we’re just going to stay awake together, and”—he forced a smile even though his muscles felt like putty as they swayed together on the tacky bench—“everything is going to be okay. I… promise.”

They sank back against the wall together, Edrisa warm against his side, wrists bound, and faces tilted towards each other only inches apart.

“You are a very pretty person,” Edrisa mumbled, and Malcolm wondered if the pawn shop with all its shelves and mirrors was starting to morph and curl like a fun house for her too.

His smile was easier, if softer with an irresistible exhaustion pulling him slowly under, under, under the pull of the poison cloud. If they didn’t get the cure, the next time they woke up, they would be in excruciating pain.

“Back at you, Edrisa,” he murmured back, as the dizziness became queasiness became a lightheaded falling sensation became…

… blackness…

… closing in on all sides…

Edrisa’s eyelashes fluttered closed in a peaceful, almost smiling expression as the cloud swooped in on her too. All things considered, Malcolm figured as he slumped against the wall and his head fell on her shoulder as he passed out, it wasn’t a bad image to die to if pawn shop Gus let them down and they slept through the pain of their impending doom. He felt Edrisa’s fingers curl around his, and he squeezed back, shackling their hands together even without the handcuffs as they both slipped off into a place out of their control.

****

Malcolm woke up to bright lights and Edrisa’s grinning face. She was sitting on the side of his bed and stuck a plastic spoon into a pudding cup she must have brought over from her own hospital room.

She sat up straighter when she saw he was awake. “I won!”

He blinked against the loud enthusiasm and pushed himself up against the pillows. “Won what now? Were we competing for something while I was unconscious? Because that doesn’t seem like a fair competition.”

“Waking up and shaking off the near-death experience _was_ the competition. I’ve totally been up for hours. You’re such a poison lightweight.”

Malcolm smiled down at the white sheet as he pulled it up to his waist. “Well, he did give me double the dose that he gave you.”

Edrisa wrinkled her nose. “Don’t be a sore loser.” She shot him a bright smile. “You should champion my victory instead.”

Solving a case and surviving a madman put him in a generous mood.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “Congratulations, Edrisa, on your superior poison recovery. While my survival was competent, you have bested me in both time and style, an important component in the aftermath of a crisis. Or so my mother says.”

Edrisa changed into comfortable street clothes while he was still out and confined to the ego deflating fit of a hospital gown. She took another bite of pudding and regarded him more seriously.

“You know, you’d be in much better shape right now if you’d just taken Mordecai’s deal. He’s arrested, by the way.” Edrisa’s brow furrowed. “Turns out his real name is Ben Miller, which doesn’t have the same Shakespearean ring. And between you and me, I think his handlebar mustache was a toupee.”

They’d rip it off of him while he was being processed into prison either way.

“I couldn’t take that deal,” Malcolm said, setting aside her observations to focus on the important part. The part where she suggested that anything about him agreeing to the offer Mordecai extended to him while they were being held captive was acceptable.

“It was a good deal,” she argued. For him, sure, but it would have ensured Edrisa’s death. She shrugged. “I would have taken it.”

He didn’t have to consider that at all before rejecting it.

“No, you wouldn’t have.” He had no doubt about that or in the fact that he never would have been persuaded to take it either. If he had taken the key that Mordecai offered to undo the handcuffs that bound him to Edrisa and locked his side around the pipe to chain Edrisa there, Mordecai would have given him the antidote on the spot. Or so he said. He was the kind of maladjusted criminal that got off on exerting power over others and breaking their spirits. All Malcolm had to do was agree to prioritize his life over hers. 

And he couldn’t do that.

Edrisa bobbed her head in thought. “No, maybe not. But you could’ve! The team wouldn’t have been that far behind. You could have been safe, and I probably would have been okay.”

He leaned forward to catch her eye. “‘Probably’ isn’t good enough when the bad end of that means you die.”

She hesitated. “Yeah?” He widened his eyes at her for having to ask, and she grinned. “Well, we escaped the kiss of death today. That’s what matters.”

He thought about how brave she’d been when they were taken from the morgue together at gunpoint and locked in a room for hours, the way she’d stayed levelheaded and let him bounce ideas off of her, suggesting her own until they had a smart plan to get out when they had a chance. How trusting she was that he could save them, like he was a hero and not the guy too slow to catch the killer before he had a chance to nab them in the first place. The way he’d been relieved when their captor handcuffed them together because at least that meant he wasn’t going to separate them or take Edrisa somewhere he couldn’t see or do anything to help her if he tried something. The nervous jokes she’d murmured at his side to manage her fear and his own confidence that they would make it out of there, because he might have died there on his own but he _wouldn’t_ let her down.

He remembered the sad shadow in her eyes when Mordecai laid out his offer to Malcolm but the courage that tightened her jaw when she urged him to take it and save himself. Worst of all, he remembered his fear when Mordecai pressed the needle into Edrisa’s neck and plunged poison into her bloodstream. The startled feeling of choices being pulled away from him before he’d had the chance to make them. The trapdoor that opened underneath him as Edrisa smiled up at him bravely and the sinking feeling that he’d waited too long to see something that was always there. Edrisa with her heart on her sleeve and his own heart unable to hide with poison in his blood and only a few hours to live.

He reached over and gently took the pudding cup from her hand, setting it aside on the tray.

“You know what washes away a kiss of death best?” he asked and suppressed a smile at the cute puzzlement that crossed her pretty face. He let his lips quirk at her under watchful eyes as he suggested, “A first kiss.”

Confusion stole over to surprise and flickered quickly to a kind of joy that radiated from the inside out. He must not have been the profiler he thought he was if he’d missed what was right in front of him for so long and what reflected back at her from his own heart when he stopped trying to ignore it.

“We should probably do that then,” Edrisa said with a quick addendum, “for our recovery.”

“I defer to your medical advice, Dr. Tanaka.”

Her smile only warmed as he leaned forward, one hand falling over the one she had braced on the narrow bed. It wasn’t the press of death but light and hope that made his pulse jump as he tilted in towards her. Edrisa’s eyes fluttered closed as he moved in, and his heart caught in a funny way. A good way. The only way he wanted to go after the day they had and all the little choices he almost couldn’t make. He bridged the gap between them and his own smile touched hers.

His palm was warm against her cheek as he gently held her to him and kissed her for surviving when he’d been afraid she wouldn’t. Kissed her because he’d survived himself and didn’t want to be afraid anymore. Kissed her because she was good and his life wasn’t, but she forced goodness into it with her smiles and friendship and terrible, endearing flirting that he could duck his amused smiles away from but not his heart, in the end.

He pulled back just enough to touch his forehead to hers and dart his eyes up. Her unabashed happiness unlocked the last bit of resistance that held him back from trying for something good when it was offered to him.

“What if we get into danger again?” she asked, teasing and nervous in the face of finally getting what she wanted.

Malcolm forced a straight face and assured her that a kiss of death could be thwarted again if the need should ever arise. “A second kiss will work too, but by the time that happens, we’ll probably have lost count.”

Her eyes flicked up to his, and the tentative uncertainty there gave way to a smile that jolted him harder than the pulse of Mordecai’s poison syringe. This time, Edrisa leaned in with both hands on his face and answered his kiss with one of her own. He laughed softly against the taste of chocolate pudding and decided that, the narrowly avoided poison death part aside, it was a pretty good day.


End file.
